


Conquests in Darkness

by Morbane



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Astral Projection, Betrayal, Body Dysphoria, Bodyswap, Constructive Criticism Welcome, F/M, sexual awakening, though not gender dysphoria, xeno!lite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 12:22:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18810826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: What it might mean to make love to the God of Love.





	Conquests in Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M J Holyoke (wholeyolk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/gifts).



Each night she went to the dark bedchamber after the light had fallen, carrying no candle or lamp, barefoot.

Each morning she woke alone.

And he was there, of course - and in every other way, the nights were different from each other. For when Psyche's husband made love to her, it was not in his own guise - as she was not in hers.

It was not her body that made love. It was not - she guessed - his body that met hers, because they met as lovers known to each other. Old, young, a woman and a man, a man and a woman, men together, women together. Sometimes nothing so precise. Sometimes two, when there were three present. Sometimes two in the middle of an orgy.

The first night, she had stood in the dark and heard his welcome and disrobed for him. As her fingers shivered over her own skin, she had felt her own touches as though a stranger made them, as presagements of what would come. Sometimes, now, she did not bother to undress as she approached, especially as the nights were colder. After he left, she found herself in the day's dress or the bath's robe again, and the sheets were only lightly scented, only a little disturbed - he had been there only as long, or as little, as she had.

To step towards him in the dark was to travel, with the mind's eye and more, the whole mind - with her soul. And finally Psyche understood the meaning of her name, and that she had come into it at last.

He had told her who he was, too. The God of Love. Otherwise their nightly transports would have frightened her from the very first, even though in their first encounter, he was like a man, and she was still a woman. But since she did know, it seemed natural. Where two sighed in each other's arms, there Cupid was. Where one pressed a kiss to another's half-sleeping brow, where one bit at another's neck or breast, where cocks thrust and knees pinned knees and tongues traced skin and fingers worked cunts - and it was done in love's passion - there Cupid was, and there, now, he brought his bride.

She was not sure how aware they were of her and her lord, these lovers whose bodies they borrowed. The very first times, both aware of her duty and hopeful about it, she had reached out timidly, met Cupid's kisses with her own, and only faintly been aware that her limbs did not quite move as she would expect them to, her hair dragging heavier on her scalp than she was accustomed to, her toes more sensitive: all these things were clearer to her when thinking back on them than they had been in the moment. Had the woman whose body she shared felt her own limbs moving without her will? Felt shy, naive, sensitive when these were not her habit?

But as the nights brought new experiences, she gained reassurance on that point. In different trysts, with different people, she found herself wanting different things. Some - slow-drawn pain, tickling, touching but _not_ being touched - were things that she could not imagine wanting for herself, when she thought on them during daylight hours. So it seemed that the will of the person she inhabited guided her desires when they were combined - and that seemed right to her.

It was not only women like herself whose part she found herself playing in her marriage bed. Often she was a man, and as her lord's domain extended over all creation, sometimes she was a dryad, or naiad, or one of the winged Aurae - and at first, to have wings or rough bark or a cock were all equally strange, and as her experience grew, none was more strange than the other.

Strangest of all: she, of such high-praised beauty, never shared her own body with her husband. It was wondering at this that caused her first to lie alone in her bed during the day and touch herself, to discover what it was she liked, and what memories of past nights resonated most with her when the world was awake.

She thought of the thrill of beating her wings against her lover's, high in cold air, as they mated in flight; of the blissful satiety of being fucked underwater by two others in between the vents where warm water issued forth from rock; of the glory of covering a mare when, as a centaur stallion, she mounted her lover's back to fill her waiting cunt with her long cock, and also reached ahead with gentle fingers to caress her lover's shoulders arched back in desperate pleasure.

Half-lying on a couch in the sun, in the mountain palace where only she dwelled, she ground against her clit with her fist, gripped her breast lightly with her other hand, and closed her eyes. Once, fucking herself with a tender memory of Cupid's words to her, as they lay in the dark after an encounter, she felt an ecstasy as if the sun that lit upon her skin were shining all the way through her, all warmth, all power, and as it faded, she also felt a sensation like a kiss upon her brow. She thought that it had been him, her husband, permitted to join with her in that moment as he joined with others during their nights, because she had made love to herself with thoughts of true love for another, and so came in that moment under his aegis.

He, a god, was permitted thus to see her, but she was not permitted to see him.

Not all of their encounters were conducted in the dark, but what they saw did little to illuminate their selves: it was not Psyche's eyes that opened onto Cupid's face. Sometimes the bodies they joined with made love in daylight, as if in another country (and the tongues they spoke in faded in Psyche's mind with the parting). But her lord warned her: she must keep the hangings drawn in the chamber where they met, and must come in darkness, and let him leave thereby, or he would be forced to part from her.

She did not cavil at that. 

Even her sisters' gossip and insinuations did not move her. Her lover had been called a monster - and so he was, betimes, and so was she, for monsters loved. (Never yet had she found herself submerged in the lust of another god. Cupid's domain only lightly abutted their terrifying, jealous passions. Jupiter, he had told her, had never yet met a lover in ways that Cupid owned, his drives half biological, half political, and in no way tender.) 

Her sisters visited, and left with unanswered questions about Psyche's husband and their sister's life; she smiled and kissed them in farewell, and their bait caught nothing.

Yet there was a darkness in Psyche's heart. It had been growing in her long, long before she came to her marriage bed and its strange unions; those nights with her husband checked it, but it was too well-rooted for love and joy to kill it altogether. Its cause was Psyche's form: the cursed beauty she had never asked for, which had brought her grasping, entitled praise, and absolute, divine wrath, and, for a long time, deep, shamed loneliness.

She made love to herself imagining other bodies and others' acts. Her sisters' comments did not stir her because in none of her fantasies had she imagined Cupid, the splendid winged god, making love to her form in his own. What she had of him she understood and enjoyed.

And she wanted more.

She was slow to understand her own wishes because they were so audacious. Her own needs were tended in the day, and her nights were sweet, suffused with joy. First she had to experience this thing beyond human experience to know that she wished for it: to live it. She wished to live in a body that did not feel foreign and cruel and set against her, as her own ever had. She wished to live in a body whose inhabitant loved it, and fit it, with a match of mind to flesh as sure as muscle to skin.

And even if she could not keep this boon, she began to hope she could live it for a time. After many weeks of agonising and denial, she placed a candle and a flint within her rooms.

Encounter followed encounter. The bodies they passed through were lovely each in its own way, and flawed each in its own way, and the beings who unknowingly shared their bodies with Psyche each had doubts and sorrows that repelled her. In the aftermath of each glorious transport she laughed comfortably with Cupid, and asked him for stories, and recounted for him those she had read in his well-stocked library and gathered from the events of her day. Perhaps she could have forgotten the candle and flint, as they gathered dust.

But she did not remove them. And under sunlight, she avoided mirrors and the still water's view.

When the fit was finally made, she tore herself away only half-thinking, feeling a desire as her body pursued orgasm that was more desperate than that pursuit: for it to go on always. She pulled away, and in pulling away, found herself in her own bed. She groped below, with the kind of awkwardness that in sexual congress had always been its own part of the dance, with laughter and fondness; but here it was only clumsiness, only imperfection. She lit her candle and looked on Cupid's face.

He lay below her, the lover whom she had so recently loved, the human eyes bright with a holy brightness. And before that faded, he was fading, the unknown man - like a mist lifting from a mountain or like a wave fading back from the shore.

Unknown, but part of Psyche knew him, for Psyche was in the body of the man's lover, and she clung to it even as Cupid disappeared.

He said nothing, the man's eyes turned desperate, accusing. As she had believed - shamefully hoped - he was locked in that body he had been seen in, as she was locked in this one. This one whose owner loved it - loved herself.

"I will find you," Psyche promised the empty air - which still might hold servants who could convey her word. "I will search the world until I find you, my lord, and if I have to give this up - I will, then."

But it would be sweet until she did.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to __ for comments!


End file.
